Madame de Sade

Hmmm. style over substance perhaps, but i think i enjoyed Madame de Sade more than most, if judging by the critics' vitriolic reviews and a half-empty theatre is anything to go by. It's true, it is a very long 1h3/4, the third and final act feels like someone is sticking pins in your eyes, there are passages which are quite laboured (to say the least), a call for more reckless abandon with the acting may be justified and there is an almost audacious about turn from Dame Judi's character at the climax (the actress was back on stage after her fall when i went to see the play, but hobbling around with a suspiciously NHS rather than Louis XVI walking stick). still, there was much for me to love, especially since i have never really had a problem with style over substance - if the dress fits, wear it. Frances Barber for one was a highlight of sparkling luminocity. While Rosamund Pike bolstered her on-stage gravitas to match Judi Dench's (successfully i thought), Frances Barber stole the show from the side lines. The play begins with two women at the home of Madame de Montreuil, mother of Madame de Sade, as they are waiting to be taken in to see the matriarch to offer support, advice and council after her son-in-law, the Marquis de Sade, has been caught in a salacious sex scandal. The two women offering council are like the angel and demon / virtue and vice sitting on Madame de Montreuil's shoulders, and Frances Barber, as the devilish council enthusiastically regaling her prim counterpart with the sordid details of the Marquis' exploits before MdeM arrives is fab-u-lous. she sets the tone perfectly for what is, essentially, a play about people getting off on recounting tales of sordid sex whist having none themselves. impassioned soliloquies about sex, torture, death, protest, proclamations of devotion or statements of disgust get the same treatment, a cold spotlight on the speaker, a strange echoey effect to their acoustics, and transfixed absorption in their telling. as each speaker lingers over salacious words, the sexual deviancy is tantalisingly erotic, the sordid details luridly enthralling . it's mesmeric, and if you ask me the "shocking" absence of men on stage which seems to have caused something of a stir in critics circles, seems utterly ridiculous as these speeches usually conjure the Marquis, and it's his mythical presence that is central to the play's tension. The tarnished silver scenery works brilliantly with this overwhelming presence of an absent figure - in the hazily mirrored walls it is as if you can catch distorted reflections of the marquis through the people verbally representing his vices and virtues on stage. As for the vision of the women themselves - their lavish costumes are incredible, the frills and bows and ruched fabric and drapery, the swoosh of satin as they flounce around, the pale pinks and peach of the dresses in the first act, the cool greens of the second, and the steely greys and icy blues of the third act, which being worn six years after the play's opening, in the midst of the revolution is like cold water thrown on the flames of passion. anyway, for all this debauchery, and despite the fact i rather liked the decadent immorality of the nobility as subject, i wouldn't recommend the play, exactly. or at all even. you'd probably have more fun across the road in a sex shop in Soho. sorry.